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Paula McLain has been in Hemingway wife territory before with her 2012 novel The Paris Wife . There was a very clear sense of purpose in that fictionalised look at Hemingway from the perspective of Hadley Richardson, his first wife, McLain bringing into light an important figure in the great writer’s life, one too often left in the shadows. You couldn’t say that Hadley deserved the same recognition as Hemingway of course or even that she had any significant input to one of the most important bodies of American literature, but the story of the role she played deserved to be highlighted all the same. Martha Gellhorn however is a different kind of ‘Hemingway wife’ altogether, and one who is very much her own person. McLain chooses a good way of connecting the woman of The Paris Wife with the woman who will be the centre of Love and Ruin . Inspired by Lady Brett from The Sun Also Rises , like many of her generation and many of the generations that followed, Martha Gellhorn is shown to be ...

Originally published in France by Dargaud in 2007, now in an eBook English translation from Europe Comics, Alexandre Clérisse’s Jazz Club is a slight work perhaps, but the bold, colourful painted artwork has a stylish quality that not only fits in very much with its jazz theme and the 60s’ period characteristics of the work, but it also represents other moods that its main character undergoes over the course of 33 years. Jazz Club opens in Los Angeles in 1966, just as Norman’s life is going off the rails. A soprano saxophonist in a jazz band, the lifestyle of drugs and alcohol have been taking their toll, and now his girlfriend Emily has walked out on him. Unable to make his instrument sing, Norman walks out on his band in the middle of a set, tells them to cancel the tour and goes off on a bender. Meeting a woman in the bar, the two of them head out in a car into the desert, and into trouble for Norman. Before we get to the nature of the trouble, the story jumps to 33 years later to...

No-one is immune to life-changing events. Authors certainly aren’t exempt, so it’s no surprise that the concerns over personal and family issues often find their way into their work, particularly if you are writing a long-running series with a central character. Perhaps it’s inevitable then, but Robotham’s latest Joseph O’Loughlin thriller is showing signs of age, or rather showing concerns about aging and coming to terms with the past. Criminal psychologist Joe O’Loughlin certainly hasn’t been immune from life-changing events. His Parkinson’s Disease has been progressively worsening over 13 years and is controlled only by medication; his wife Julianne died 16 months previously from a blood clot; and his two teenage children are finding it difficult to come to terms with the loss of their mother, the youngest girl Emma still in a stage of denial which is manifesting in irrational behaviour and causing her problems at school. On top of all this, Joe is now hit with an even bigger family...

There are promising aspects to Shattermoon , the first book in a SF series by new writer Dominic Dulley, but originality is not one of them. That’s perhaps not as important in an opening book as establishing a strong team of characters and providing a thrilling adventure that brings them together, reveals aspects of their backgrounds and personalities and places them into a dangerous situation that gives some insight into the universe they are operating in and highlights potential for future conflicts. On those points Shattermoon certainly delivers. Orry and her family of grifters have managed to pull an elaborate scam on the Count of Delf, an important family at the heart of the Ascendancy. In addition to her fee for some antique collector’s books, Orry has managed to trick the count’s grandson into giving her a green pendant, an ancient heirloom that has been in the Delf family for a long time. Orry is unaware of the value or the nature of the pendant, taking it on a w...

Mick Herron, as we know by now from the elaborately labyrinthine twists of his wonderfully amusing accounts of the intelligence services in the Jackson Lamb/Slough House series, does the whole secrets thing well. And characters who have secrets. And characters who want desperately to keep those secrets hidden, so desperately, they’re prepared to take desperate measures to keep them hidden. This is What Happened is also about secrets and desperate measures but it’s on a difference register and with a different focus from Herron’s spook novels. Not that you would immediately recognise this, as the novel – a standalone work outside of the author’s regular series – starts out with a young woman, Maggie Barnes, who is involved in a top secret espionage operation. Maggie is just an ordinary person, working in the mailroom of Quilp House, but she’s been recruited by an MI5 agent, Harvey Wells, to keep an eye open for any irregular activity, as ‘Five’ have suspicions about the building being...

There are two detective stories in Henrietta McKervey’s Violet Hill , both in and around the same locations but set 100 years apart. The obvious question you will be looking an answers to – aside from the solving of both mysteries – is what do the two stories have in common and what is the purpose in bringing them together; is it just to contrast police investigation methods and what the respective cases tell us about the society they are set in or is there some other purpose? There’s also a little bit of a supernatural element brought into proceedings in Violet Hill and some connections that seem a little forced, but it’s not so much to suggest that there are some mystical forces at work as much as add a layer of historical perspective onto proceedings that we wouldn’t normally consider. One of the investigations, which you might think is at least the main case in terms of precedence (and title, of course), takes place in late 1918 and early 1919 in London. Rather unusually for this ...